Friday, March 29, 2024

March 29, 1999 — Newsletter #21

GOODIES TO GO! ™
March 29, 1999 — Newsletter #21
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Please visit http://www.htmlgoodies.com!
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Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors…


This is Newsletter 21. We’re legal.


With all this talk about Y2K, we hardly had time to be worried
about DJ10K, the Dow Jones 10,000 (that’s the level the stock
market tries to hit). Fortunately, all is well. The Dow
bumped up to just over 10K and none of the computers crashed.
Now, should we be concerned about P1K? That’s the concern
that the Pentium chips will go over 1000 MHz and not be able
to handle the four-digit number. ;->


Now onto the topic of this week’s newsletter….


I make a good bit of my living by writing and posting pages
to the World Wide Web. I’m assuming all of you have been to
my HTML Goodies Web site: There you’ll find literally
thousands of pages devoted to teaching you the languages of
HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, and a little XML, too.


And better yet, it’s free. I have never asked for a dime for
any of this information! But, as you may have noticed, I do
have banner ads on my site. Each page has a banner ad, in
fact.


So the other day I was watching TV and on came a story about
a young man who has invented a piece of software that blocks
all these ads out. He talked to the reporter in an overt tone
proclaiming he was striking a blow for the little guy.


What little guy? The little guy who’s so oppressed he never
has to pay a dime to get into a site? The little guy who can
see sports scores and stats less than 10 minutes after the
game is over for free? The little guy who can read newspapers
from all around the world, shop on-line, download entire text-
books, and basically find a wealth of information never before
realized in the history of civilization? That little guy?


Wow — I almost got into a Dennis Miller rant.


This is actually not the first time I’ve run into this
argument. Back before my relationship with EarthWeb began,
I literally did run HTML Goodies for free. I wanted to keep
it that way, but couldn’t. I was cutting a check for over
$500 each month just to keep the site up and running. I
simply couldn’t put out that kind of money and keep the site
free.


Soon after I posted my first banner advertisements (AOL was
the first banner ad on HTML Goodies, by the way), I ran into
an academic colleague at a conference. We talked for a while
and then he really told me off, saying that I was doing
something horrible by putting up the banner ads. His thought
was that information is free and should remain that way. But,
I said, it is free. I am not asking for any money from users.
That didn’t matter. By putting up the banner ad, I had done
something sacrilegious in his eyes. We actually haven’t spoken
since the conversation (it’s silly, I know).


So the dilemma started: Either keep posting banner ads and
keep the site running or crash the entire site. To my wife
and me this was a no-brainer: Keep the banner ads and keep
the site.


But still people would get upset. I received my share of
flaming e-mail, telling me that I had somehow “sold out” by
putting up banner ads. I attempted to calmly explain that
without the ads the site would die. That didn’t matter. Some
people even told me that the site should die in order for me
to keep my dignity.


Huh?


I don’t know how many of you run your own businesses, but I
would bet that those of you who do were darn surprised at
the actual amount of profit you make. Am I right? When you
went into business, you expected to make a ton of moolah,
right? I did.


What a shock. Until you have run a business and have had to
file quarterly, you’ll never believe how much gets eaten up
in business costs and taxes. So much is taken up that you
simply can’t roll in profits. In fact, HTML Goodies ran for
a good year before it turned a profit (my wife gave me dirty
looks every month that I cut a check for more than was coming
in).


I always thought to myself that the people who proclaimed I
was doing something horribly wrong must have been thinking
that I was setting myself up as a king somewhere, rolling in
banner ad dough. Sorry. It ain’t so. I’m still a full-time
university professor. If I had been given a license to print
money through banner ads, do you think I would be working
two jobs (Goodies and teaching)?


Read the financial section of the papers. Major sites like
Yahoo! and Excite have yet to turn a profit. Why? Because
this stuff is expensive, that’s why.


Geocities doesn’t post all those little banners because
they’re mean or they want money to burn. They do it because
all of this Internet stuff costs money, a lot of money. I
don’t put banner ads on HTML Goodies because I want to
vacation in the Bahamas every winter, I do it because I am
on a phenomenal series of servers that can handle 4 million
hits a month. Plus there is a full staff of people whose
primary job is to keep the site up and running. Then there
are the costs of phone lines, dedicated T3s, building rent,
the security for the building, and a bunch of other costs.


I get letters all the time from people who tell me that I
could get the htmlgoodies.com domain on a server for free.
No, I can’t. No server is going to take that amount of
traffic and give it to me for free. I actually had to take
my site off of one server because I was taking three out of
every four cycles of the CPU and was darn close to shutting
it down.


I’m not telling you all of this to impress you. I’m telling
you because soon you will be sent a spam e-mail, or get word
from a friend that you can get this new software that will
block all those banner ads. Before you run to the download
site, stop and think.


If you, and a great majority of other people, block the
banners, how will sites like Goodies continue to provide
services for free?


They won’t.


If the banner ads are blocked, it’s my opinion that one of
two things will happen: Either the site will ask you to pay
a fee to get in, or it will crumble and shut down. The Web
will be a series of reference pages, personal sites, and
sites that are dedicated to selling you something. A Web
site like HTML Goodies, that offers everything for free
through the use of banner ads, will not exist.


If these ad blockers become big downloads and people put
them on their machines in order to “teach those big sites
a lesson,” the big sites will either go away or you’ll be
asked to pay for the use of their service and information.


So, the next time you go surfing, make a point of looking at
the banner ads. No one said you have to click on any! It
would be nice if you did, but you don’t have to. Are they
really that much of an annoyance? Isn’t a 465 by 60 pixel
space on your browser window giving you free access to so
much information worth it?


I guess it’s all in how one phrases the argument. You can
either claim to be making a stand against big corporate
something or other and block out the banner ads, or you
could see them as a necessity that allows you the ability
to grab lots of good stuff for free.


I like “free.”


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


And that’s the end of number 21. Thanks for reading. I
really do appreciate it!


Joe Burns, Ph.D.


And Remember: The six flags that fly over the Six Flags
amusement parks represent France, Spain, Mexico, the
Republic of Texas, the Confederacy, and the USA, the six
different flags that have flown over Texas at one point or
another. Texas is where the Six Flags amusement park started
and the other parks have just kept the same flags.

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